


The Samahl Sulahna: Third Collection

by Keturagh



Series: The Samahl Sulahna [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, BDSM, Barebacking, Bratting, Cunnilingus, Dom Solas, Dom/sub, F/M, Fluff, Public Masturbation, Public Sex, Punishment, Rough Oral Sex, Sex, Smut, Solavellan, Sweet Moments, dom!solas, solavellan hell
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2018-10-30 19:22:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10883325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: Samahl Sulahna: Songs of Laughter, Third CollectionThis is the third volume of the Songs of Laughter, short works chronicling the romance of Solas and Pangara Lavellan. Their time together is rooted in love, trust, and longing. In their sexual dynamic Pangara plays the role of a rebellious brat with humor and generosity, and Solas very much enjoys disciplining and dominating her. Indv. chapters are rated below.Pieces:Iburrow(fluff ~ Solas and Pangara trapped in a hole in the ground)IIplacing hands(slice of life ~ Solas and Pangara in battle)IIIfalling suns(explicit ~ dom!solas in the Winter Palace)IVwar room(explicit ~ dom!solas delivers anal punishment)Vcenser(explicit ~ Solas, aroused, watches Pangara dance)VIgifts(slice of life ~ Solas in the field with Blackwall and Iron Bull. Solas treats rope for his play with Pangara, which she wove for him as a gift. Solas and Iron Bull bond as friends over the task of domination.)VImornings(slice of life ~ soft cuddling)





	1. burrow

It pushes up from the ground: a single sun-furled trillium jerking side to side. The rain patters the green leaves and the fleshy white triad. It’s grown close enough to the edge; Pangara could reach over and pluck it. The sun slants through the rain and she decides it’s too precious to kill. The frantic down-callings of songbirds in the trees flitter through the canopy.

“Any sign?” He asks from below.

“None!”

She feels him shift and her balance wobbles for a just a second - a moment of suspended breath and blood before he shifts his grasp on her legs and she can kneel. For extra purchase, she walks her hands down the craggy silt of the exhaust shaft, red caking her hands and knees. But when she is sitting on his shoulders, instead of lowering her further, Solas walks with her away from the hole in the ceiling.

The apostate is lanky, but a broad and tall man. The dark wood beams abandoned to weather in this mine pass close to her head. Pangara snatches down to hold onto his tunic and her toes curl as she laughs. “You gonna let me down?”

She sees him press his lips on the side of her knee. She can feel his chuckle through her feet.

“I thought to take you back to your bedroll. There may be old nails.”

Pangara leans forward and directs a meaningful look straight down.

“I possess enchantments,” his tone is lofty, just a hint of smugness, and in response she digs her thumb to the sensitive point where his ear meets his jaw.

His yelp is anything but dignified.

“Put me down, or I won’t tell you what I _did_ see.”

She is able to pick up the way his sigh is an exaggeration of mournfulness, able now to catch the subtle rise of his brow and the way his lips suggest their mirth as he kneels and she walks off of him. He straightens, she turns. He easily links his fingers into hers when she presses their hands together, and he steps closer when she tugs on him just lightly. He ducks his head near to hers and if it weren’t for the way his eyes look like he’ll die without a taste of her, she might almost think he’s happy. Then his eyes close and he kisses her. As always, it is quicker than she can think; his arms slip around her waist, he palms her ass, he nudges her up around his thigh and when she rocks he makes a noise into her mouth like a man begging.

 _“Solas,”_ she says, her bottom lip pulled between his teeth - because he’s acting drunk.

 _“Vhenan,”_ he murmurs, and he wants her. She can feel.

She breaks the kiss but holds him close, and he rests his forehead against hers. His lips twitch again. Rueful, this time.

He steps away from her and his arms drop to his sides. His head ducks lazily, watching her. The way he regards her is so loose. She knows he’s hurt himself in their escape, in their desperate retreat from the troll; neither of them had noticed the drop-off in the middle of the clearing. They’d tumbled down into the mine. The way the stone had shaken around them had buzzed her teeth in her skull.

A night of fitful half-rest, interrupted by the occasional stomping and roar of the troll above. Sounds mistaken for the calls of Inquisition scouts, or Cassandra’s shouts. But no one had come. Solas had said the Dreams were too quiet here for him to walk in sleep for reinforcements. He’d rolled root and smoked in the quiet dark.

And this morning, rain mixed with the sun. “Halla’s Breakfast,” she’d said, peering up at the sky and the wrinkled red rock carved up to the surface. The mine isn’t all that deep.

He’s been siphoning mana into his wound to heal it. A subtle set of charms, but she’s felt him draining the ambient magic out of the stone-swallowed air. Some internal break, she is able to guess. But he’d insisted that she save her strength. Refused to let her examine him. Smoked. Insisted this morning that he could lift her to the crest of the shaft to see if the troll slumbered nearby.

She puts her fingers against his chest, trying to make the touch like a seduction - but he senses her intent, and gently guides her hands away.

“And what did you see in the rain above us, then?”

He makes her grin by lifting his hand and twirling her under his arm. His breath does not hitch. He does not flinch.

“Red-winged soldernut, chased off by a pickersjay.” She pulls away and settles onto her bedroll. He leans up against the rock next to her. She pulls his backpack near and opens it as he closes his eyes, and she pretends she does not notice the wavering of the Veil as he weaves a weak spell into his body.

The bag is worn leather, soft to touch and smelling of woods and sharp grasses. Pangara gently pushes aside a soft bundled fur and a small canvas sack that holds his bar of soap. She can smell it like crisp comfort, peppery and herbal. The coarse scrape of a ball of jute meets her touch. She finds the jerky and apples in a tight bundle and unwraps the package, portioning it out evenly between them. He resists his portion of the jerky, though, looking into her eyes and saying softly, “I have no appetite for it, vhenan; but one of us should eat it.”

Why he’s being so damn stoic, when _she could help;_ it’s baffling to her.

They eat in comfortable silence. The sun shifts slowly over the ragged opening to the world above. He nibbles the small, lumpy apples - eats them cores and all - and above them rises the chorus of birds in flight, and their songs at nest. The rain has made a small rivulet that dribbles down the shaft and into the mine.

“We could probably risk it,” she murmurs between bites of jerky.

“Mm,” he agrees, but neither of them stirs.

It’s a peculiar feeling: sitting _under,_ looking _up._ The ground around her feels oppressive as ever - but the opening up into the world, beyond the unexpected cloister of this dark and hidden den, feels suddenly like a rift into a world where she will spiral. Where she will be called on and needed. The varied songs of birds wanting to nest, to mate, to warn, to build, to share, to summon, and to greet whisk a cloud of sound beyond that portal.

He has taken her hand in his hand and he rubs across her knuckles with his thumb. The red silt on her hands comes off on his fingers.

“Lovely pigment.” He says when he notices.

A soldernut alights on the edge of the opening and calls out. Pangara whistles a sharp, short whoop then three high notes in return. Solas laughs.

“That’s very good!”

“We have soldernuts up north, too,” she grins. And then she mouths through a series of songs and calls, sometimes bringing her hands to cup her chin, or putting her fingers to her lips. He watches her sideways and tries to hide a smile when he recognizes a call - and she’s not a little proud of how she can pull the phrases from memory, recalling long-ago mornings spent competing against her uncle to match the squeaks and rolls, the throaty whoops.

And then, after Solas takes another apple from the backpack and bites it, swallows, and clears his throat, she realizes he’s decided that it’s his turn.

Chatter, _curlews,_ and impossible trills and _krees,_ smoothly folding into soft and uncanny tu-whus and back up into the high registers. His mouth barely opens, though his cheeks pinch back, and each song is reproduced rapidly, precisely, and _loud._

Pangara feels herself recoil. She seizes up, cusses, and pulls back. Because _how is he that loud?_ His lips are pulled and tucked a little tight, but she can't otherwise see how he could be making this much noise with just his cheeks and tongue. His birdcalls ring off the damp rock walls, buzzes and trills and screeches, and the soldernut above replies in alarm before winging frantically away.

 _“How are you doing that?”_ She presses over the wall of song, and he only grins and shifts away as she pulls at his sleeve. He is done now with all the calls she knows. He is moving on, whistles yipping and chirruping in songs more elegant than she’s ever heard, songs that say greetings in deep forests and territorial warnings on the banks of long-forgotten rivers filled with snowmelt. The songs he weaves - they are beautiful.

Her ears are hurting - her ears are ringing.

This man is _never_ loud, and _this?_ Solas may be a woodsman, and she knows this about him, and he may have developed skill in birdsong and calls… but what is this volume? She covers her ears, begging him with her eyes to stop. And his eyes have gone sly. And they’re still a little unfocused as he smirks at her. Unless he is using the very thin magic remaining in this shallow hollow in the earth…

Pangara narrows her gaze and he shifts away from her again, pure mischief in his eyes.

 _“What have you got?”_ She says loud over the cacophony, and when he scoots another handswidth away from her, still whistling, she lunges at him, catches his side and pulls herself close, scrambling over him. His songs falter around his laughter as she wrestles with him and tries to get him to open his mouth. “What have you got!” She repeats, pressing against his chest, knowing there’s a trick, and he refuses to part his lips and only grins at her, taking the chance to nuzzle at her neck. And then when she pries her fingers into his mouth he suckles on them, dirt and all. She shakes her head, trying hard not to be infected with the dopey, ridiculous grin he’s got twisting his lips around her fingers, and she roots around in his mouth until her fingertips touch the device.

They come to a brief stalemate in which she glares at him and he tries to look both unaffected and dignified with her hand stuffed in his mouth.

Flat on his back, he releases her fingers with a chuckled snort and she pulls out a remarkably simple little instrument covered in his saliva. A flat of apple bitten into a bean-shape, with a small sheet of apple skin adhered to the surface by a very simple spell.

She holds it up. “You could have just swallowed this?”

His grin drops a little and he seems a little stunned as he considers that. “I… suppose.” And then she notices his hands cupped on her backside, shifting her forward a little on his lap, and his eyes crinkle at the corners as he traces his touch up her back; her chest is pressed against his, and his gaze flicks down from her eyes.

Pangara feels herself redden when Cole says, “Found you.”

“He’s got a broken rib, and he’s been keeping the pain down,” she says as she staggers off and away from Solas, who sobers at once and nods pleasantly to Cole, lifting himself on one elbow.

“Cole, thank you for locating us. Has the danger been cleared above?”

“Yes, the trees shook and shook and all the woods hurt but where were you? Everyone asked but there is so little… ” Cole’s hands spread, and Solas nods.

“Spirits would have difficulty navigating to us here, you did well. We’re grateful.”

Pangara links the belts on the bedrolls and Cole snaps out of existence - and the refinement drops out of Solas’ eyes the instant they are alone… leaving the heat.

She says, warning, “Whatever your game, it let me find what you were hiding.”

“A worthwhile sacrifice,” he admits, and he manages, when the rope ladder drops to them some time later, to pull himself out of the ground.


	2. placing hands

“Inquisitor!”

Grit or dust is grinding in his teeth as his jaw works; he tries to reach out with a light touch across the Veil, looking for the sense of her magic pulling from the wellspring of the Fade. The bones of the shattered corpses trip him, tangle at his feet. He stumbles. A dry reek puffs from rotted clothes on the skeletons and a deathshead moth unfurls from one desiccated nose. It flutters, huge and eldritch, shining like its wings are wet with blood, bobbing behind him through the moonlight.

“Inquisitor! Pangara, Pangara!”

He cannot keep the edge of panic from his voice. This will be his downfall, he knows; he knows he must moderate his feelings. He must quiet his mind and center his emotions. But he had heard her scream and then he had heard nothing.

“Pangara!”

“Solas.”

He lunges around a corner, hand trailing on the wall to sense for any runes tied to traps beneath the tiles.

“Pangara?”

“Solas,” her voice again, more distant this time. He backtracks, turns the other way.

A statue of Mythal in her seat of power looms before him.

He almost walks past, but then a hint of fear tremors in his throat. An instinct; a memory? He walks closer to the statue and ignores the part of his brain shouting that he must run, he must find her.

The statue is perfectly nondescript. It is as any other of the mildewing relics of this sundered world. Its mimicry of flight is nauseating in this age, diminished to totem. And ever still a balm for him. Even now, a bittersweet icon of succor. And of desire. The walls are crumbling and there are no clouds over the stars.

He kneels.

The ground is cold.

He pushes aside a cluster of vines and his hands are scraped by its many vicious little red-tipped pins. They are already touched with blood. And then he sees it in the moonlight: the once-glassy surface tarnished, its face like a riffle in a stream. A mirror. Or at least, a mirror is what any mortal of this age might mistake it for. And of a magic he had thought long-lost to this realm.

That the nobles entrusting their eternities to Ghilan’nain would have chosen to bind their magicks to such a cruel net? That was her nature at the end; her gifts corrupted. Her powers shifting and angry. The surface seems to blister as he stares at it. He leans close.

He whispers, “Pangara.”

And she is revealed to him at once, the colors around her sickened and the trees around her dripping their leaves to the earth like ichor.

“Solas.” She moans. Not to him.

The creature that his holding her looks like him.

It crouches over her, tracing her breast with its fingers, pushing his touch between the bone buttons of her shirt.

It has wings - terribly twisted and mangled, covered in the sludge dripping from the canopy that rots above them, but even when Pangara reaches around and touches its back, when she grasps around the protrusions and caresses them, she gives no sign of alarm, no tell of conscious thought.

“Solas,” she says again, and kisses the thing’s bottom lip, its chin, his cheek. She traces her nails across the jawline that mimics his.

But in her whisper, can he hear the start of fear?

He does not say anything because he knows now she cannot hear him. He sets to his work. She is in danger and the portal to the dreamplace set into this plaque at the base of Mythal’s statue would only trap him, too, if he reached straight in for her.

He must find a way to come at it from the side.

Or better yet, the top.

He springs away and searches the ground for a stone. Finding one of correct weight and shape ( _and it takes too long, it takes too long_ ), he brings it back in front of the mirror. He can see Pangara and the creature through the flush of thorns. He sits cross-legged. Its long fingers (just slightly too long, and the nails now black, now clear) drop to tug at her breeches. Solas reaches out to the Veil and then does what he must.

Calling on a reserve of mana that is still too weakened for this sort of trial, he takes his conscious presence of the Veil. He studies it. Pushes at it. And then, a clean swipe cutting his own mind as certain as any surgery; Solas removes his mind’s protections, and he ceases to perceive Fade’s wall.

A rift (small, perhaps too small even for this) slams open in the air above the portal. It keens and glimmers. The sounds singing from the tear are almost loud enough to drown out her mounting gasps. He hates himself for how much of a relief that is. He feels the whole of the Veil around that point shudder, his sense of song coalescing as he works to sew together the pieces of his mind he’d torn to make this rift appear. And at the same time, quickly before any wandering spirits may be drawn to this curiosity in Ghilan’nain’s Hollow, he raises his hand flat before him. He breathes down upon his palm.

The floating green vision of the Fade swirls and yawns. He blows harder on his palm. The sides of the rift puff out, bowing just slightly.

A strangled, inhuman cry from the creature and then her voice, raised in fear and rage, snarling at and rejecting her attacker. He hears the sound of flesh impacted, but it is followed by a tinny echo that sets his teeth on edge - a mutilated noise of something wrongly grotesque. He breathes deeply again and blows steady and hard into his open palm.

The _irassalan_ had been crafted from both waking and dreaming. Places of imagination and physical weight, they had been interiors of both brick and the minds of the architects of Elvhenan. Solas thinks on the fate of such places with a swell of that familiar guilt. One such architect, he is certain, fights with Pangara now: a thing driven mad by the mutable nature of its surroundings while for centuries its soul sang and sobbed for waking and flesh.

A spirit comes near the rift.

And he knows it on sight, but still he must keep widening the cut. And he begs, silently, trying to reach out with his aura. Turn back, turn back, leave this behind.

But the spirit is Remorse and he has drawn it here unthinking. Sloppy and careless. It can do nothing else than walk slowly towards him from the other side, raising one hand in a melancholy, old familiar greeting.

The irassalan were paths made of dreams and waking. The one in which Pangara is trapped is adjacent to the realm of this Spirit of Remorse on the side of the Fade. As Solas weakens the Fade by touching this physical realm to its borders, the mirror at the base of the statue starts to glow. The sounds of Pangara fighting the beast grow louder. Solas’ ears are glutted with the downpour of harsh whispers from the rift, yells and animal snarls, and the deep throbbing hum of Remorse coming slowly closer.

He whispers words of power into the last breath from his lungs. The words touch and flame on his palm: a new rune created from the seared raising of his flesh, and he smacks his palm down onto the stone in front of him. The mark burns true into the rock. And Remorse is smiling at him, ghostly and sad, from the other side of the rift, and he must get Pangara here to close it - quickly, before the spirit can come through - and he hurls the enchanted stone at the mirror at Mythal’s feet. The portal shatters. The sound of it claps through the room and his ears are bloodied by an ethereal screech.

“Solas!” He hears her shouting, and he lunges forward, the little rift forgotten above him. He catches both her hands in his.

“I’ve got you! Climb!”

She struggles to pull herself up his wrists, arms, her body squeezing through the portal, her clothing and hair covered in foul-smelling flesh and sludge. He hauls her through the dwindling door and as she falls onto his chest he holds her close, then fumbles at her left hand. “Quickly,” he starts, hoarse, but the howl behind him tells him it is too late.

Confused by the tiles on the floor, perhaps. By the solidity of the ceiling. By the stone face of Mythal, even. By all the stars, stationary above.

Remorse becomes Anguish, the spirit twisting in its madness, and it tears itself apart.

“Let me up,” she rasps, and he realizes that his arms are far too tight around her.

She seals the rift.

They sit together. She pushes out of her sopping, blackened coat and he melts ice over her hair, washing the ichor away with cool water. She touches his fingers, but it is a long time before she will look at him again. And when he bends to kiss her wrist she shudders, so he does not touch her for many hours and warms the ground beneath them. It is morning when she reaches out and grasps his hand.

She watches the magic knitting the rune back into his flesh.

She says, “I thought you had me.”

“I thought I’d lost you.” He admits at the same time.


	3. falling suns

The most magnificent of wonders in the largest city of the Dales, when the Dales were ruled by elves, was the temple of Elgar’nan: vast and hallowed, its arched walls open to the eyes of Elgar’nan’s father, the sun. Tree branches heavy with white flowers bowed through the temple walls. Flags patted the east wind as it past, much like the sounds of the aravels when the summer breeze kicks up. And the stone steps ascending to the temple doors were always warm; many cats would lounge there so that the temple was never plagued by mice or rats. Young men would sprawl on the temple steps, too, it was said, trading stories of courting their lovers.

And the Keeper said that any light that touched those stone steps was sacred. Light that touched Elgar’nan’s temple could be captured in a clay jar. And if that jar was buried in the earth for a fortnight, the jar would absorb the lullaby of Elgar’nan’s mother, the Earth.

Then the jar would sing when shaken.

Pangara’s mother had said that her great-grandfather had once had one of the singing jars. “But,” her mother had finished the story, shaking her head, “it shattered when I dropped it. I was very young and should not have touched what I was told not to touch.”

And then she had swatted Pangara’s hands away, again, from her canning jars.

Pangara remembered how the light had shone through the glass. It touched the grass in many colors.

“Inquisitor.”

“Please, Solas.”

“Come, Inquisitor.”

Yet she lingered. The spectacle of Elgar’nan’s temple had been burned in the first Exalted March. The temple itself had been broken, though the walls enclosing the gardens still stood solid. First one palace and then another had been built here. Pangara imagined the old stone arches bricked over and painted white. She thought of remnants of the temple floors hauled away in carts and delicate tiles imported from northern Orlais. Young emperors in blue summer suits catching lizards on the steps and small, cherub-cheeked empresses-to-be riding ponies over the jars that must still sit, cold and abandoned, in the wet earth.

The night was dark.

“The Ambassador would like to speak with you,” Solas said. And then he added, his tone distant, uninvested. “I would be pleased to see you inside.”

She looked at him and wondered if he’d ever dreamed in Halamshiral. Had he seen the temple that had stood here, where now a palace reused its ancient stones? Hints of the grand architecture of their people remained in the steps and arches. She wanted to ask him, but something stopped her. He looked taller in dress uniform. His chin was high, jaw sharp, a distracted longdog look glittering in the blue of his eyes. They stood before the gates of the Winter Palace and she saw him changing the way she saw Sera or Cole change right before they melded with the shadows: hunter’s eyes, prowling.

She suppressed a shiver.

The night was cool.

Pangara knew she looked tired already. She felt the strain under her smile.

“Masks on so soon?” she asked, and lightly touched his arm.

Her ‘elven manservant’ bowed and donned his cap. And, for a moment, when he looked down at her, his smile was gentle.

–

The evening had been long. Accords reached, arrests made, and servants scrubbing the sting of blood from the palace walls.

The Game played. Just another night of death in the Dales.

And now, how long the night would be.

When Solas left her on the balcony Pangara was dizzy and cold, trying to make the stars stay in one place in the night sky. She leaned against the wall and breathed and tried not to feel like this whole place was a graveyard, remembering the look in his eyes.

“Snowlace room,” he had breathed into her neck, and then wrenched away and left her. He had been sensual. Then urgent. When he walked away his gait was stiff.

The Game played on through the rooms of the Winter Palace and in the gardens below.

Courtiers milled in the halls. Their skirts fluttered and slid on the floors. Pangara passed Leliana and the Spymaster said a few low words to her, a pointed, “Enjoying the music?” Just to let her know that their dance had been seen, had been noted, and was likely already the subject of gossip. The low titters of Dukes and Duchesses echoed off the gilded ceilings. Pangara walked down one hall, then another. Visible in the courtyard through the windows, a fountain was the playground of four young women putting on a wild show. They pressed wine glasses to each others’ lips, then passed around a pink-and-white box of what Pangara had been told was lotus snuff.

She felt the fear pulling tight once more - like a metal snake rising through her guts and then holding her heart. Masks. And too many limbs, and too much noise; someone’s voluminous sleeve rubbed her arm and she recoiled from even this slight touch. She felt as if the front of her body detached from the back; it was only the feel of her feet hitting the floor that kept her from floating away, uniting her two halves.

She passed a dozen doors.

She found him seated in the snowlace room.

It had been aptly named. Two doors down from yet another of the endless libraries and adjacent to a blue room and a room filled with stuffed fennecs. In this room, every surface was covered in the delicate white and tan snowlace. The chairs were upholstered in it. The walls were patterned with it. The mantle was covered in it.

Solas faced the door on a white plush chair, leaning his elbows on his knees, one knuckle resting on his lips.

Was it nervousness, the way his leg bobbed, just for a second? He leaned back and his hands spread wide on his knees. He nodded to the chair across from him.

“Sit. You have earned rest.”

She struggled to come back to herself.

“Josephine insists the feasting will last until dawn.”

“True enough. Their appetites will sustain many more intrigues.” She caught him giving her that intense, almost-pained look as she sat across from him, the one that made her feel like she was the only thing he’d ever wanted to see, his whole life spent waiting to look at her. Just as quickly it was gone, replaced with a small half-smile. “And many more indiscretions.”

The fire warmed her front. It lit him from behind. Their teasing had been all half-steps and words that meant other things; he had made promises under promises that made her reel to wonder at what he intended for her tonight. Here in this place of power; old powers, new powers. He’d placed his cap aside. She felt the tug of him on her skin. She wanted his breath inside hers again, like he had been so close to her on the balcony, pressing his body against hers, pressing his length against her thigh, pressing his thigh between her legs…

A hundred perfumes made the air feel close and heady.

“You dance like your feet are underwater,” she said, relief of her feet relaxing as she toed out of her boots.

“Ha! Is that a compliment?”

“Do you need compliments?”

“I do not need them, but any man would thrive under your good opinion.”

“So, all you seek is my good opinion?”

She accepted the glass of wine he passed to her, drank deep. She needed to be steady and this was the last thing that would help, but it felt good to sink further. She felt safe again, near him. The panic had receded; it was quieter in this room. He was here. He was solid. She was left only with the queer sense of unreality.

“That, and other things.”

His lip twitched. She leaned back into the chair. Her back was to the door.

“What things?” she asked.

Whatever she had expected, it was not for him to lean forward and tilt his head and say, “Loosen the ties of your trousers.”

Pangara stared at him.

He was unnaturally still, except for his eyes, which narrowed in greater and greater mirth.

“That,” she said slowly, “is a strange invitation to dance.”

“Note the eyes of the painting above the mantle? Some second cousin of some twice-removed aunt. I blocked the spyholes with felandaris. We enjoy more privacy here than on the balcony. Leliana needn’t worry. Of course.” The hot carelessness of his tone returned, the ease of wine showing in his pinked ears and how his smile loosened. “We are not entirely alone, either. I was not under the impression that such things bothered you.”

“… Your impressions are fine,” she conceded.

She knew he knew that this excited her. The crowd; present, but distant. The nobles unsuspecting. Debauchery in the lavish, overwrought world of their ridiculous Game.

She felt her heart pounding. It hurt, in her chest. She felt again that the sky spun; only this time when she looked up it was gilded inlays against white plaster.

Had this been where priests kneeled in supplication? Had men held their tongue here under the branding of their vallaslin?

She dropped her hand to her lap.

His gaze followed.

She tilted the wine glass in her other hand, the mark shining up through the red. And when he glanced back up at her his gaze was all lechery and challenge. When she really looked at him, when he looked at her like this, in this place where once the divine once dwelled - she did not know if he appeared to her more like a priest, or a prince.

She moved for him like a supplicant. Heart thudding, she pulled her laces loose.

She watched his throat bob. He nodded. His eyes were intent on her lap.

“Touch yourself,” he said, low.

She did.

Under his gaze, she slipped her hand below her trousers and into her smalls. She caressed the heat between her legs, found her clit, and pressed.

“Good,” he murmured.

Was his voice strangled? She hardly noticed, rubbing herself in slow circles; she was under his guard and suddenly more at ease than she had been all night. She was almost surprised to find how quickly her body sank into the familiar, relaxing rhythm, even here: in this seat of shems all whoring for power of state.

The fire was hot. It brought a heat like sun against her skin.

“What do you want…?” she asked.

“Lay back. Close your eyes. Then continue as you are.”

She adjusted as he asked. She brought one foot up to the seat, finding her breathing deeper and better. The scents of perfumes did not bother her as much. Instead she smelled oak smoking in the fireplace. With her eyes closed, she heard the flames crackling behind him. It was soothing.

“Harder,” his voice was low, but came into the dark space of her mind clearly.

She increased her pace.

Warmth spread through her limbs. Her arm ached lightly; it was a good, familiar feeling. She felt her body canting up, thrusting.

She imagined him watching her. She thought of his eyes: their shape and color, his nose, the plush of his lips. Remembered him bent over her, lifting her as he’d kissed her on the balcony.

She moaned gently, and then snapped her eyes open.

“Yes.” He was grinning. It was slight, but she could tell. His legs were crossed at the knee and he was leaned to one side in the chair. His fingers curled over his lips.

“Continue.”

She did not close her eyes again. She watched him watching her. He seemed to enjoy this very much, and the intensity of his eyes on hers had her close to the precipice in moments. Her fingers jerked over her clit. The velvet of her trousers moved over her hand. The smell of smoke and the sound of the fire filled her; the room seemed brighter, clearer, and Solas nodded slowly.

“Good. More.”

And then, from the hall behind her, she heard a haughty, screeching voice: “I am certain I saw the Inquisitor in _one of these rooms,_ my dear, we _must_ introduce ourselves.”

Pangara stuttered to a halt and started to sit up, but Solas reached a forbidding hand in the air between them.

“Continue,” he repeated.

“Solas…”

“Continue.”

Swallowing, she kept her eyes trained on his. And she did as he asked. She buried her fingers back into her smalls, feeling her cheeks grow hot as her body tensed and the voices came near. She had slid low as she touched herself in the seat of the high-backed chair; she only guessed that this would hide her from the door.

“I’m just dying to meet one. Imagine, right out of the legends, a real Dalish!”

The voice was coming closer.

“Solas,” she said, urgent. He was smiling visibly now, well-pleased, his foot tapping lightly in the air.

Her body filled with a low, ringing song. Her smalls were soaked; she could hear herself, the sop of her heat louder with each frantic pulse of her fingers.

“Solas,” she begged. She heard footsteps in the hall.

“Inquisitor.”

“Please, Solas.”

“Come, Inquisitor.”

Her release crested through her body, her belly, limbs, and brain, and filled her mind with fuzzy heat. She was vaguely aware of Solas surging up from his chair and walking briskly past.

She stifled a panting moan. She rode her euphoria, sweating and hot, hand spasming on her clit. She heard him say, “Ah, Duke. Duchess. I serve the Inquisitor. She has awaited the chance to lead your wife on the dancefloor, Your Grace. Might I beg your dance card? I will make her mark.”

Feeling sluggish, the world coalescing back around her slowly, Pangara shuffled at her clothing. She nudged the trousers back up her legs, knotted the clasps and re-tucked her undershirt. She rubbed the slick from her hand into the lace cushion of the chair. And when she was presentable, still shaking, she pushed forward and pressed her feet back into her boots.

“Duchess Prendre, Inquisitor,” Solas announced for her as she stood.

The room had snapped to clarity. Infused with ease, power sang satisfaction through her body. She stepped to the Duke and Duchess and the smile came easily.

“A pleasure.” Her eyes slid to Solas.

He bowed his head, lips twitching.

“She does speak! You do know the language of the Empire, yes? And so well!”

“Now, _pet,_ ” the Duke said, and the nobles fussed in a quick and hissing argument behind their masks.

Pangara looked inside herself and tried to find the threads of her anxiety. But she felt grounded; peace flourishing inside her body. She still felt her heartbeat pounding in her throat. 

She was warm.

As he stepped by her Solas said, quietly and in simple Elvhen, his breath sweet with wine, “I will find you in the garden.”


	4. war room

“Are you entirely without shame?” he said, closing the door to the war room behind them.

“You know I absolutely feel shame, and a crippling portion of it, even. Just,” she grinned and pulled him closer, “not when it comes to this.”

Then she pulled his mouth down to hers and he was fumbling with the holds of his vest, shrugging out of it and leaving it on the floor as she kissed him. She pulled him across the room. His eyes closed; he stumbled forward. Everywhere she was on his skin felt like burning.

When she came away, gasping for breath, her hands were grasping the cloth of his shirt. Pangara had pulled them to the war table - here was the true seat of her power, obscured by the darkness of the room, the stones gray and cold beneath their feet.

Then the leader of the Inquisition turned her back to him. She slid her hands out side-to-side on the deep old grain of the war table. She shook her backside at him like a harlot. The look tossed back at him: all dare and _so-what-will-you?_ in her eyes and lips.

What would he indeed. He studied her swaying in the dark. His fingers tucked one glove down around his wrist and then each finger off, and he moved slowly; he could not have pulled his eyes from her if he’d tried. She had been whorish for the entirety of the their return to Skyhold. And he had been powerless to act, given the unusual size of their party: Varric, Cassandra, Dorian, Blackwall, himself, and the Iron Bull besides.

They had liberated a mining operation from the clutches of the Red Templars in the Emprise. Then they had removed a threat of no fewer than three clutching dragons from the mountainside. Both operations had been agony to him; his private panic at the state of this world, at the speed at which it was deteriorating. It drove him desperate to her arms. 

And how eagerly she’d welcomed him.

But their moments had been few and brief. A caress. An embrace. A murmured word. She would squeeze his shoulders. He would touch her knee. The gentle pushing of her hair from her eyes. Always finding the smallest moments of privacy, and still frequently stumbled across by one companion or another. Varric raising his hands and backing away with a knowing smile. Blackwall telling them gruffly to put down the fire when they tucked in. Dorian offering, sincere and cross, “Frankly Solas, if you want to find a little cave or whatever you do and just leave behind all the blankets for me I won’t say another word.”

The Commander had recalled their party to plan the siege on Suledin Keep and its demon master-of-the-house.

Arrangements had been four to a tent on the journey back to Skyhold. Even the slightest indiscretion would have been known.

And she had known it well.

Seven nights of catching her lip in her teeth when he looked her way, then laughing. Seven nights of goading him, of sitting close to his knee and asking him of his journeys in the Fade. Her eyes had been bright when she probed to know more of the orgiastic dinners of certain pre-Andrastian Ciriane tribes. She whispered things across the fire that only his (and possibly the Iron Bull’s) ears could pick up.

Cheeky, filthy things.

So what would he do now? With her ass wiggling, swaying slow and pert, taunting him? Her smile still pink from the cold mountain air?

It was dark in the cavernous war room. The still of night unbroken as shadows moved across the moons.

He spared a glance up at the chandelier, at the roots of this once-great fir which had sheltered accords of peace and plenty. He snapped. The wicks of the candles in their iron candleholders all puffed to light at once. Then he looked down at the map and memorized the locations of every pin and marker, every icon and assignment.

Then his body slammed against hers.

His front pressed to her back. He pushed her, hard, forward. He lunged over her, covering her body with his broader frame. Iron markers scattered. His hands clamped down over hers. He drove her forward until her hips were flush with the table, and he pinned her and moved his lips close to her ear.

“Perhaps you need to be humbled, da’len.”

She caught her breath and _spat_.

The wet slime hit his hand; he did not give her the satisfaction of flinching, but fires orbed behind his eyes when he pressed them slowly shut; he forced a calming, steadying breath.

She said, “I thought you liked me proud.”

Several small explosions popped in the candles above. No, she could not enrage him.

But… to be _spat_ on… to be _spat on_ …

He brought the hand soaked with her saliva up. He smeared the wet onto her chin. Then he slowly clenched his fingers around her neck and thrilled to feel her lean forward, pressing into his hold.

“I like you dignified, not crass with the nasty manners of an impertinent da’len. Filthy and rude besides, begging - ” with every admonishment he crept his touch further up her leg, and every time she yelped his heart rolled. He ran his fingers up to the skirt of her armor. He brushed the soft fringe of leather. She was still in her Dalish heavy gear, unwashed from the road.

He squeezed her throat, gently, gently. “You will beg me for dignity when this is through. Incorrigible woman. You will humiliate yourself with what you desire.”

He paused.

He paused, for when he pulled the bottom of her skirt up over the curve of her ass he expected to find her Dalish smalls, or some other womanly underclothes Josephine had ordered her measured for in Val Royeaux.

Instead, her round backside was bare. Plump and curved and bare.

He stared.

And then he smacked her ass, walloping her with his bare hand. The full weight of her cheek jiggled as he squeezed. “Wide hands,” she’d once moaned, and his hands were full of her now.

“Fuck,” she cried out.

“You will speak in Elvhen, or not at all.”

She shuddered and traced the grain of the great wood table with her fingernail, looking back at him with a cheeky grin.

“That barely stings.”

He flowered her ass with a strike of his flat palm, and then another to the other cheek. When he whipped his touch away he watched her ass ripple. She was reddened already by his attentions. He knocked his foot to the inside of one ankle, and then the other, spreading her legs apart.

“What did I say.” He did not ask it as a question.

She readjusted her weight on the war table. Moonlight pulled across her body: her pauldrons had been removed earlier, and now one strap of her leathers dropped off her shoulders, her disheveled top peeking one tit out of her bustier.

She cried out when he smacked her again. And again. Her ass was cold to touch, so he rubbed his hand in slow circles before pulling back and slamming full and fleshy another strike. This time his hand landed with a satisfying crack and a howl from her lips.

He chuckled. “Are you no better than an animal, with such a cry?”

He felt a need to pour himself into her, wanted suddenly to fill her full of him, to be the end of all her thoughts and the start of all her desires. He wandered two fingers over the curve of her cleft. He touched up to her tucked little clit and rubbed, hard and languid, taking his time with a pressure that made her gasp.

“No,” she moaned. She rocked down onto his hand. “No, I’m… I’m no better than a _slut,_ _bitch dog_ in rut, I want… I want…”

“Elvhen,” he crooned.

She accepted the correction with a grateful whine.

_“Ma nuvenin, Tar’len. Ma nuven ma’adhaldhis. Isala las?”_

Granting him control, begging for his cock, and asking for her release; yet her tone was sharp and coy. She pressed back onto his fingers urgently, her ass wiggling in a way that made him bite the inside of his cheek, made him consider, momentarily, hauling her back to grasp him. He would have her lock her ankles behind his legs, her arms reaching back to hold his neck. He’d hold her waist and thrust into her while she bounced and wailed; he loved hearing her beg to be fucked harder.

He loved pressing his face into her neck when he fucked her from behind.

He would hold his lips on the salty sweat of her hairline.

She was soft and she wanted to be held.

And she wanted to be _fucked._

She had been courting him these nights past.

Propriety was lost to him now.

He would have her.

“Turn to me,” he said. His voice was hoarser than he wanted it to be, but he saw the way it made her hands shake and clench. “Kneel.” He suggested this, only, tone soft, but she dropped to the tiles on her knees.

“You are beautiful.” He touched along the side of her cheek.

Then, “Spit,” he instructed.

She looked up at him with marked confusion. And then wariness. He reached into his trousers and pulled the band down under the straining weight of his cock, already hard. He settled the band beneath his testes.

“Spit,” he said again, clearer. Quieter.

Harsher.

She looked up at him, coyness replaced with fear. And a glimmer of hot anticipation.

Then she bent over his length and dribbled saliva over his cock. She made as if to raise a hand to touch him and he swatted it away, saying, “No.” He made her spit until her mouth and throat were dry, and she coughed slightly when she breathed. His length was soaked by her wetness, glistening and darkening down to his trousers. She had edged closer to him, fully absorbed, and he’d watched her forget that he was watching. Repetitive, requiring her attention, the task had consumed her.

She had forgotten, perhaps, that this had started with an insult.

He placed his fingers gently through her hair.

She paused and glanced up, eyes moony in the candlelight.

He wrenched straight up and she squealed, scrambling up, agony and longing twisting her face. He pressed forward against her, moving her back against the war table, and spoke lightly, unable to remove the humor from his tone, and she shook against him, too, both with the rush of the pain of being dragged by her hair and, he saw, now with shocked and panicked laughter.

“Taunting me night after night? Drawing me near? And the moment we are alone together you spit on me? Unacceptable behavior, da’len.”

“You’ll punish me?” Her nose crinkled, her voice low; she cocked one shoulder forward.

He moved aside the leather frontpiece between her legs. He pressed close, his cock against her entrance, able to feel the heat and slick rubbing between her thighs.

“Elvhen. I spoke in error before. You are no da’len. You are a… a dog, was it? A _slut bitch_ in heat?”

She moaned and nodded, pushing her head to rub against his shoulder. His heart stopped to feel her so intimate, close and wanting against him.

“Ah. In that case, _ma malfenasha_ , I will not punish you.”

He touched, gently, her elbows, traced his touch up her arms.

“… In that case, I will tame you.”

Her breath hitched.

He spun her around and slammed her down onto the table with a firm hand on her back. He lifted her leather skirt once more.

He placed his tip at her hole.

She tensed, did not call their word, and then, almost imperceptibly, nodded.

Then he plunged his cock, wet with her spit, hard and sudden full into her ass. His balls pressed against her cleft. He pushed her forward against the table.

She screamed; she choked, and sobbed.

Her hands jumped and scrambled for purchase on the table. Iron markers fell aside. He watched her writhe in pain and, simultaneously, try desperately not to move at all, the pain likely running in electric, agonizing jolts up her spine. He kept still within her and watched the sweat breaking on her hairline, her eyes tightly shut. He watched her try to gasp for breath and then control a gag.

Just before she had fully steadied, he moved within her.

She moaned; he had to close his eyes and when he opened them again he trained his gaze on the chandelier, on the flicker of the candles. He was close already, sensation singing up through his erection and spreading warm and wanting and good through his entire body. To be in her, after so long; he had gone longer, of course. Had gone centuries, eons. And yet since having the warmth and pliancy of her body under his, she had become a fix he hungered for; he longed for her at all hours, hid the extent of his craving even from himself. So that, as it hit him now, the rapture of consummation… rocking inside her, her ass tight and her body shaking… he was ashamed by how close he was.

He released a trembling breath, and then, again, she _moaned._

“Un…” He groaned and slid within her. The spit was not enough. The feeling was rough and raw. Then she rocked back. He clamped his hands on her hips, frantic to make her stop. He was too close.

He reached out and put his fingers in the short mess of her hair. They breathed together, each adjusting. The dim light did not reach beyond the table. The brick walls of the war room appeared almost to pillow in the darkness.

When he was confident of lasting, he pumped inside her. Slow out, then in.

“Isala…” she begged.

“No,” he commanded, hoarse.

His pace frenzied and she bit back her cries of pain. He used her ass meanly, reckless and relentless, his fingers in her hair. And then he reached down and smacked. His palm reddened her round cheeks riding his cock, earning a yelp, and then he smacked her again - thrusting and spanking with growing abandon. His pleasure swelled within him but he held back, waiting, panting, thrusting and listening to her sounds crest from agony to frustration.

 _“Solas,”_ she sobbed. She looked back at him, twisting her head under his grip, and her face was stunning - tears ran from her eyes, her nose red, her lips bitten and red.

He tightened his grip in her hair, his other hand stroking up the whole of her body - one long, sensual touch from her backside up the curve of her spine, the cut of her shoulder, to the delicate crest of her ear.

“… Did you say, vhenan, that ‘it barely stings?’ Was that your complaint, earlier?”

She whined and cried out as he thrust.

“And what of your grievance now? Dissatisfied, still?” He inched from her, pulling back, tracing the delicate cuff of her ear as he departed. And then he thrust hard, grunting as he dug deep within her, and she shook her head violently from side to side.

She moaned no, no, no.

She gasped for breath.

“No scorn left in you, then?”

Curious (and unable, he admitted to himself, to keep away), he caressed around her leg and up her inner thigh, nearly coming undone when he felt the splash of clear, thick streams coating down her legs. Her passion came away on his fingers. He sighed, groaned.

“Ah, _ma malfenasha,_ you are indeed in season.”

She groaned, mouth lax and tongue loose, her eyes rolling up and panting.

He hissed and resumed pulsing his hips, her ass now receptive to him - still raw, but her tight heat too much around him, delirium devouring his thoughts as he grunted. Sensations of pleasure and pain fitzed and sparked and spiralled him into a madness of taking her.

He pressed over her, bending her deeper, grinding her against the table; the iron markers still standing shook and toppled, pieces rolling and clattering to the floor. He clenched his hands around her ass, pressing, forcing her hips back harder against him. Her fingernails bit into the wood, clinging for purchase as he beat furiously into her ass, mounting her with greater and greater brutality until finally, as she howled his name and her head whipped back, he slammed into her and his spend fell from him, filling her, his cock throbbing as his vision was pushed aside by a vibrant show of stars and heat and lust.

He withdrew from her and was on his knees at once, lifting her at the waist onto the table and pushing her forward across the map. She screeched, surprised, then cried out his name; he pressed his mouth and fingers against her sex, avid, relentless. He pulled back and watched his own spend leak from her as he pleasured her, then buried his tongue back in her taste, circling her clit with certain, hard fury. She came when he walloped his right hand overhead in a final, ruthless spank; she bucked forward, writhing with bliss, grinding into his fingers still pressed up around her clit.

When she rolled over and sat up she laughed and pulled an iron flag out from under her legs, tossing it to the floor.

He clung around her waist, burying his head close against her belly, on his knees beneath her. The table’s edge pressed at his chest.

She held his chin, breathing hard.

She smiled.

“Shameless.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _ma malfenasha_ \- a phrase that would translate literally to "my bad wolf woman," taken here to mean "my bitch"


	5. censer

The first time she danced for him, they were alone. And he was unprepared, and drunk on wine and regrets, and he leaned back - sprawled, really - in the chair in front of the fire in her quarters. Yarn mountained around in baskets of all sizes. The brown fur of the rug was warm under his toes. Something - a knitting needle, he ventured to guess - dug into his hip, but he didn’t dare move.

He couldn’t move because he did not want to distract her. Because he knew, instinctively, that moving would pull her to him, like a hunter circling close to shifting prey.

And he couldn’t have her drawn to him. He couldn’t watch her slink up to him on her hands and knees, have her climb up his lap, feel her pressing her hands up his thighs. He couldn’t watch her toss her head; if she looked up at him, if her eyes met his… if she did that, he would lunge… 

He fought just such an urge now as she pressed her ass, sultry, snake-like, up and back until she was upright, her knees spread far apart, her feet touching in a point, her toes curling and overlapping one another. She pressed her hips forward, then she dropped them to one side, and pulled them back: _swivel, circle, thrust,_ while her hands played over her thighs. They bunched in her shirt to tease glimpses of her stomach. They pushed meaningfully over the rise of her breasts; she explored her curves, undulating, her body always in motion: becoming motion. He closed his mouth. She moved however she wished, taking only occasional queues from the music drifting up from the training yard. Solas heard his heart drumming with the intoxicating rhythm of her body: circling, dizzying, slow - sensual.

It was not the first time he had seen Pangara dance. So he had known she had musicality, power; she’d spoken of the traditions of dance in her clan. Shown him some of what had survived. 

But this… this confidence. Intimacy. It was the first time he had seen her dance like _this._

Her eyes were closed. She hadn’t looked at him since she had first uncurled on the pelt, dragging her slow touch. She didn’t seem to care whether he stayed or went. He clenched the rim of his cup, hanging empty from the tips of his fingers. His throat felt dry. He cast his mind back furiously, his brow hot, his other fist clenched on his knee, trying to think. But nothing that he could bring to mind had taken place to prompt this. To prompt _this._

Just the music, swaying melancholy in the night - a few faint notes curling up with the draft.

She gathered her short hair in her hands and twisted her fingers. Thrusting up, she tugged her head back to expose her neck. Her shirt pulled up as she raised her arms, teasing the pale line of her belly in the firelight again.

When he remembered to breath again it was a loud, desperate gulp for air, embarrassing only because she noticed. Her lip twitched in just the barest acknowledgement. He swallowed. Then he lost sight of her face as she extended her arm overhead and dipped back, back… back - her hips thrust forward, her soft stomach fully exposed. He hungrily, guiltily traced the length of her arched body with his eyes, poetry comparing her to the arc of the moon, to the hanging willow bough, dying on his tongue as he lost all ability to speak. The cup trembled in his grasp.

Arms reaching, she slid onto the back of her head, feet arching to lift her from the ground and then somehow she was backflipping over one shoulder, fluid. She hunched over her knees. She extended her legs up, out, over, like a fan, or the beat of a butterfly’s wings. Her eyes were still closed, her face peaceful, and he felt his own mounting arousal pressing in his breeches. But he would not interrupt her for the world, for any world.

He could hear it when she breathed in. Her breathes punctuated her form - when twisting, her exhale was loud, when stretching, she breathed in. It felt like she took all the air in the room into her body. He felt himself bulging, felt the restraint of the fabric of his breeches. He tried to steady his breath, tried to close his eyes - but he couldn’t look away from her. His breath came quick, shallow. He realized he almost felt like crying, but the moment he became aware of this his heart iced over and he clenched the fist resting on his knee.

Still, she danced - and he fell in love with everything she was without him. He loved the firmament she traced with her body; the solid weight of her limbs and the atmosphere she set on fire with her breath: in, out - the whole room breathing with her. The night breathing and moving in the slow, hypnotizing ways she moved. She made the fire her echo. She made herself into something older, stranger, more wild than any god.

He watched her dance on her knees, and when she told him to come he did, and he knelt to touch her lips.

Later, when he would take her hand in Val Royeaux, he would put his fingers on her chin. He would shield her moment of self-doubt from the rest of the party (she would not want them to see her cry). 

He would say to her, low and intense, “I have faith in you.”

And she would not know what he really meant. She would not be able to hear his words like a confession, would not remember this conversion, would not see the yearning, hot like worship, in his eyes.

Instead, she would look at the rift in her hand and say, bitterly, “But I don’t.”

But he would remember this, and he would know it was a lie.


	6. gifts

“So it weren’t some elf ceremony, her growing all that elfroot?” Blackwall knocked the spoon against the pot, the dull thock of wood hitting iron almost drowned by the sound of the river.

The weight at the end of the rod was heavy under Solas’ grip. Water sloshed up his knees, his efforts to fight the river’s course drenching him in sweat under the hot sun. His back was turned to the Warden and the Iron Bull.

He smiled and shifted the rod. The canvas bag attached to the other end dipped back into the strong mid-river current. The river spread just beyond the fall of the rod, joining a modest mountain lake where they had set their camp. A flock of large fowl, some manner of mostly-black goose, he ventured to guess, bobbed and flipped their feathers and shat along the shore, uncaring of the men who camped nearby.

“Not at all,” the Bull answered, “doesn’t seem so anyway. Real talent. Shame she can’t put it to good use.”

“Refrain, please, from any suggestion that she would thrive under the Qun,” Solas interjected, speaking loudly enough over his shoulder to be heard above the river. The Bull laughed and gave him a liar’s apology.

“Don’t have much of a leg to stand on where that’s concerned now, I suppose,” he chuckled.

Solas felt the water tugging at the canvas sack and the bundles soaking within. Nothing could truly spoil the good humor of this day. His light mood had seemed to infect the other men on the road. That morning they had found the wolf pack, rabid as reported, and put them out of their misery, then it had been an easy enough climb to this spot. They’d bantered, easy and even raucous, the whole way, stopping only to piss and once to track a path Blackwall swore was a moose trail but which disappeared, traceless, beyond the line of trees.

“I’d figured,” Blackwall slurped a taste of the broth and potato chunks, “needs more rosemary, Bull, you got any? Aye, thanks - I’d figured all her quiet nights in the garden were part of some moony thing. Kind of worship for her,” Solas looked back to watch Blackwall gesture to his face, fingers swirling in the air over his eye.

He turned back to the river. “No. It was not a Dalish ceremony.” He pulled the rod up again and judged that the soaking was complete enough. Hand-over-hand, he drew the rod back towards the shallow bank; it was unwieldy, and the sack on the end swung, sending a splash of river over his bare chest and rolled-up breeches. He grunted, shook the water out of his eyes, and struggled a little with the weight.

“Gotcha, beanpole.” Solas heard the heavy splashes of the Bull coming up behind him, then large arms reached around to help him rein in the gunny sack. “I’m interested to see if your kind grind the fur the same way. You gonna use fire, too?”

“It is not uncommon to leave the fibers for rougher work, but I prefer the idea of… a gentler touch, for this purpose.”

Bull clapped him on the shoulder, grinning and, in truth, almost sending him under the water. “Your eyes go all soft when you talk about her, mage.”

“And I appreciate your discretion, Iron Bull,” Solas said pointedly, and the Bull laughed. Blackwall kept his attention on their meal. Solas and the Bull shared a glance; both men knew that Blackwall must have a passing inkling of what they referred to, but it seemed he didn’t much care to discover the details.

The gift had been impossible to hide from the Bull. 

Pangara had delivered it Solas in the middle of the tavern at Skyhold, of all places. Solas had just stopped by to return one of Dorian’s books, and had been drawn (foolishly, he must stop indulging these lapses of judgement) into a game of Diamondback.

He remembered her, the way she had come downstairs to their table, proud and laughing, Sera making filthy noises from the second floor. She told him later that she’d often sat in Sera’s windows with her dowel and cords, twisting and cabling, getting in fights with the child. She inevitably regretted her words when the day was done.

She’d heard him downstairs: his cool reveal of the winning hand, the hooting of Blackwall collecting on bets, and the mixed, losing groans of Donal Sutherland’s crew.

When he’d looked up and seen her on the landing, her grin had tilted, wicked.

“A gift,” she’d descended the steps, announcing loud enough to catch the attention of the whole tavern, “to entice you to leave these good adventurers their fortunes.”

She’d dropped the cloth sack on the middle of the table. All eyes watched him curiously. He’d lifted out what was inside. He’d expected something exotic bought in Val Royeaux, or perhaps some enchanted artifact smuggled from Tevinter.

What she had made for him: four lengths twice-length his armspan, two lengths thrice-length his armspan, and one length one-length his armspan, all with a bit of extra length to lose in the conditioning.

Seven lengths in all, hand-spun. Unmistakably lightweight, he recognized the pale sheen of young Royal elfroot bast fiber. He’d lifted the bundles from the rough sack, touched the fuzzy cords, and tried to say anything past the thickness in his throat.

“How…?” he’d choked, and she’d pointed smugly at her vallaslin.

“Ropes and weaving.”

And of course, the Bull had recognized at once that this was no mere traveler’s ropekit. He’d given Solas a knowing, sideways grin, and said to Pangara, “That’s beautiful work, boss. You got the touch.”

She’d laughed, bought them all another beer, and then they’d shared one last night together before parting ways for three agonizing weeks. It was longer than he’d been apart from her since… not only since that night in the Exalted Plains, but, well, really, since he had sat beside her bed in Haven. He’d been alone and afraid and confused, holding the Anchor while she slept and murmured about things she should not know. She had healed the sky and he’d remembered looking up at the great rip between realms, knowing the moment it all changed, ‘what have I done?’ He’d been worried to be apart from her when she awoke. Letting her drift too far from his influence would put him in danger, so he’d kept himself close, if aloof.

Perhaps not aloof enough. Now he yearned to touch her. He longed to speak with her every night and let her hold him. He ached for the kind of release she could allow him: the strength, the control, the power to do right, to do well. To hold her and take care of her.

The Bull teased him again for the way he was smiling, but he paid him no mind. So his heart was light and his head filled with beating wings and fast currents. She had labored over these gifts for him, for what they had together; everything she could have given him, and she knew just what he needed. _I love her,_ the words were a low, giddy constant in his soul, _how I love her, love her, love._

He’d boiled the ropes for just a short time in the soup pot before Blackwall had added the stock and vegetables, and he’d only wanted to rinse the lengths in the river. The large fowl in the lake squawked and splashed and seemed not to fear Blackwall, who left the broth boiling down and went off to make one of them their dinner. Solas carried the sack over to the line of trees and untied it from the rod. As he worked, he thought idly of how much he missed her. He imagined how she must have toiled over this rope as he tied one end to a branch and unrolled it across to another. The Bull helped him, reaching higher branches.

Between the two of them, it was short work hanging the ropes up to dry in the sun.

The Bull traded Seheron’s versions of old Tevinter riddles with Solas’ memories of the original Elvhen versions. So much had been altered by time and translation, yet even still, so much endured.

“Is it, a lake?” Bull guessed.

“Most of the ones that reference mirrors are, yes,” Solas chuckled easily. “Not terribly original.”

He was calm, gazing up at the taut ropes dripping river water into the leaves of the goldenrain trees. The ropes were like strange plumage decorating the branches, almost festive. He felt like his heart was in a constant celebration. His mind buzzed with persistent bliss. This feeling had lingered longer than the tingling of her goodbye kiss, longer than his memories of her warm arms clinging around his back. The ropes swayed in the breeze. Her fingers had nimbly twisted them. He had been troubled often lately with the consideration of what he could give her in return, what he could give her as a token of his esteem.

The Bull, of course, knew where his thoughts must lie. “So what are you gonna give her?” he asked, going back to the fire and sitting heavily, easing his bad leg up onto the stack of logs they’d chopped for firewood.

“I admit I’m at something of a loss,” he said.

Should he be careful with Bull, or make a show of good feeling? He did not know how much was false face and how much true in his dealings with the Bull these days. He found he wanted to appeal to the man’s newfound freedom, yet he knew such ease was dangerous. A company of fellow soldiers in a forward camp: it would be easy to slip, to reveal more than he meant.

Blackwall ladled their portions into bowls and passed them their meals. “Y’ask me,” he said, pointing with his spoon, “a gift must be hand-wrought in return for like.”

“So,” the Bull agreed, “what can you make, mage? You into, what, ice sculpture? Garden of fire flowers?” He drank his soup from the bowl, the spoon of too modest a size for his large grip.

Solas kept his bowl in his lap, leaning back against a log. “I’d no idea you’d encourage the working of magic for courting, Bull.”

The Bull snorted. “I don’t. Just want to make sure I’m far away when you mages start to use demons to say ‘come warm my bed.’”

“Is that something the Qun has taught you mages practice when taking lovers?”

“Look, all I’m saying is, you mess with magic, you treat it casual? Next thing you know, a Desire demon is taking your place in the sack.”

Solas tilted his head and considered, “With the way things are now, that fear is… not altogether unwarranted, although far too simplistic, and indicative of the -”

“Alright,” Blackwall cut in, bringing them back from the edge of the argument. “Anyway, he’s not going to use magic. She’s a mage too, and he’s got to give her something she can’t get for herself. Not easy,” he blew on his soup spoon, his expression mournful. “Inquisitor’s got armies, a throne, good swordsmith and plenty. What could any of us offer a woman like that?”

Neither of them could think of anything the Inquisitor lacked, save victory. Privately, Solas thought of all the things Pangara would desire: to be able to go home to her clan without magic bright and cruel her palm, to master her ill-bred stag, to hear from him the truth… Not that she knew he withheld anything from her. But he knew she would want the truth, if she knew she did not have it… He let the notion slip from his mind. This was an easy enough discipline; he employed it often.

He joined the men in trading tales of old battles while light flickered the surface of the lake and the fowl complained and washed their ruffled heads. With only sparse clouds, high and rib-like overhead, the sounds of birds light in the trees, and the rush of the river, it was easy to voice the simple indices of loss: _I lost a man I could have saved, he withered in my arms; the girl was safe but arrows found her somehow._

When it landed, Blackwall enticed the raven close and picked open the note, reading Harding’s assessment. She assured them of her party’s progress up the mountain path - faster, now that Solas, Bull, and Blackwall had dealt with the wolves. They were to hold their position until the scouts caught up.

His gaze kept wandering back to the ropes hanging to dry in the trees. He kept smiling, softly and fondly, and the Bull would always laugh when he noticed.

In the garden Pangara had cultivated trenches of a weed found easily enough in the valleys and forests in the lower Frostbacks - it was a red-leafed variety, and not fit for intoxication, and he’d thought nothing of it. He’d decided that some Dalish tincture must require the root in such great numbers. Then there had been rumors of the plants growing tall, being culled, and growing again in impossibly short intervals; _magic loose on the grounds_ was whispered among the troops. The rumor shouldn’t have been too alarming, given the presence of the mages in the east tower, but the Inquisitor’s special attention to the crops had turned heads.

How could he accept that all that time, so many of her very few hours of repose, she had been thinking of him? Solas had been determined to treat the ropes as soon as possible, to use them, to prove to her what he could do with such a gift. He would prepare something special. Something… suspended, he decided, after carefully considering the strength of the ropes. Yes.

They slept around the fire, for it would not rain. The next was a rare day spent aimlessly, drowsing lazily in the grass and only going out to catch fresh game and return for the work of skinning, salting, and cooking it. Blackwall took another bird. Solas went and felt the ropes as the afternoon waned. After two hot days in the high elevation, the ropes were dry and ready to be worked.

He enlisted the Iron Bull’s help once more, together they rubbed the fibers from the lengths, pulling the ropes hard over the rough haft of Bull’s great ax to teach the ropes to droop and relax. The many rough fibers were stunted, shavings floating in the bright air, and the rope started to feel smooth. The Bull casually mentioned a particular oil he always carried with him, from Seheron in origin, that never soured or spoiled the rope. Solas was curious, and asked to know of its make.

Blackwall set off with his sword and a handful of berries to go and meet Scout Harding and her party at the fork down the hill. Solas and the Bull sat elbow to elbow, and they spoke openly about the practices of bondage in a society so rigidly defined. Bull answered as ever: to half-satisfaction, always alert for Solas to get too gentle, too open to his prying interest. Solas did not give him the satisfaction, pressing enough of an attack to keep the Bull from seeing much else in him besides anger and impatience.

Solas knelt across from the Bull and they dipped the ropes into the flames, each swift. The ropes popped and fizzled, igniting and quickly burning out. The scent of burning grasses filled the air. By the time they had finished the singing, each length of rope was buttery to touch.

Bull brought the oil. They wetted rags and argued about method, practice, and tradition: altering a certain tie was disrespectful, combining different knots was easier for a certain pattern, how to immobilize without adding more rope. They crossed expertise of this intimate artistry, each surprised at the knowledge found in the other, both coming to a place of half-grudging respect.

“Come to the tavern sometime and I’ll show you that box switch I was describing on Krem.”

“That man will not sit still long enough to tie a hitch, much less the variation on a butterfly tail that you have described.”

“You’d be surprised what Krem will sit still for as long as there’s a pint of ale in it for him, no shittin’. He’s a good kid, and between you and me, I think he likes it when Dalish watches.”

Solas snorted, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d been allowed to talk like this: simple and eager on the artistry of it, the technique, and all it meant for the person who took the ties.

Blackwall returned with Scout Harding. Her crew tiredly held the reins of the mules, burdened with the tents and cooking pots, pulling the carts with the tables for potion making and map charting. The Bull deftly finished tying the length in his hands into a bundle. He tossed it to Solas, grinning when Solas jerked, dropped his own rope to his lap, and twisted for the catch.

“You’ve still got to think of something to give her. Something she wants or needs more than anything.”

The Bull went to help the scouts lay camp. The fowl in the lake had perhaps figured out that Blackwall had quietly removed some of their number for food. One petulant bird sounded a rowdy alarm and the rest of the flock took up the honking, noticing the encroaching party and suddenly desperate to move on. Solas finished oiling the last of the ropes. He watched as the birds dashed their wings against the water; they burst from the lake, rampaging into the air. He passed the rope from hand to hand, looping the cord, watching the flock wheel higher and higher.

What could he give her? He had given her a fortress, he had given her his heart. But he had not given her the truth.

He should go and help the others unpack the mules and set the camp. He replaced all the bundles, save one, in the sack. He would keep the sack close until he saw her next, the light scent of the oil perfuming his sleep. He watched the flock fly away. The sky was still bright, and the clouds pink. The rope was soft and it moved well in his hands. He pulled the end free and tied a simple noose. He held it up to the sky and saw no daylight through the knot.


	7. mornings

There’s an urgency to how he holds her in the night: arms like twisted sheets, his chest pressed against her back and sticky with his sweat, his mouth on her shoulder - his head moves sometimes in the night, his dreams troubled, and she feels his lips gently brushing her skin. Pangara has come to expect the tactics of his right leg, pushing: its persistent sliding nudges until her own leg is shoved flat and his hips and knee settle victorious over her, and he’s warm and heavy and curled close into her shape.

She wakes and jerks. When his arms stay tight around her, she knows that he’s still dreaming. The edge of the bed sits against her cheek, and, yes - another night, and she’s practically hanging off the bed. Pangara glares straight down at their cups from last night, an empty plate, and the floor.

“You pushed me off the bed.”

“I did no such thing.”

“You _practically_ pushed me off the bed.”

“According to you, I was moreso holding you back from the edge.”

“According to you, I’ll end up falling off the bed. And probably into the Fade. You’re a thief. A bed stealer. You stole the whole bed.”

He chuckles. “That was… a sleeping me.”

“Oh, sleep Solas? He can’t be trusted?”

She likes to bicker with him for as long as he’ll enjoy her breakfast with her: honeyed berries and soft rye bread.

“That’s right.” His smile is soft and admits a little guilt. “So it seems.”

When he goes she misses him wrapped around her, misses his sweat and his too-long, too-tight arms, and his sleepy unknowing kisses, and she has the whole bed.


End file.
